>But mass-culture in Adorno's
>day, all the way until the Sixties, really, was a dreadfully oppressive,
>racist, mind-bendingly patriarchal and stupefying affair; what we see
>nowadays -- the occasional black and white film, for example -- is just
>the high-quality stuff which survived. The counter-culture was the
>prison-break from this particular form of mass-culture, but Adorno died
>before he had a chance to reflect seriously on this.
Dennis, you wouldn't happen to be a baby boomer, would you?
So you are saying that mass culture today is *not* "dreadfully oppressive" or "stupefying." Have you turned on your television recently? Or gone to see a movie (any old one--even one of those black and white films, the photo stock of which presumably makes it a liberatory art film--but a great place to start would be the mass-culture epics of Tarantino, Oliver Stone, or Spike Lee)? In fact, mass culture of the 30s and 40s was much less oppressive than anything today; I haven't seen anything remotely similar to swing music or Frank Capra since the 60s.
And let's say that this counterculture was some sort of departure from the past (which I don't buy, but for now let's say it is). What happened to it? At best, it became the new dominant mass culture. At worst, it was (willfully? perhaps even joyfully?) coopted by and absorbed into the dominant culture. Either way, once it's on top, doesn't that automatically make it the oppressor?
Just a-musing,
Eric